The Collected and the Ultimate Collector
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Edlis, who owns what is said to be one of the world’s best private collections of contemporary art, was armed with an arsenal of one-liners. He identified the main attraction in any number of Koons pieces as “the boobs,” said he purchased one because it matched a rug, and opined that the Wunderkam-mern label as Wainwright wants to apply it is a stretch. (“Let’s face it,” he said to Koons at one point: “Your stuff is ree-llly slick.”) Yood described collectors as “disciplined hoarders” and identified the subject of a Koons painting owned by Edlis as Miss January, 1998. The artist, now 50 and looking a lot more buttoned-down (cropped hair, dark suit) than the wannabe stud of his Cicciolina days, spoke with a voice and worldview so modulated they might–like his recent paintings–have been generated by a computer.
White dreams of presiding over a thrift shop where artists and teachers would take what they could use from his collection. With the help of a single employee (also paid from the trust), he’s built hundreds of scrap-wood shelving units for this hypothetical shop and crafted thousands of cardboard boxes–cockeyed little boats with green tape wrapping the seams and edges. “Can you imagine,” he says, surveying his domain, “all of this going in Dumpsters?”
